Archive for the ‘Widgets’ Category

We’ve made a few improvements to the mixtape’s menu. The big one that people will be most excited about is the ability to view the full playlist. We’ve also taken into account persistence – music doesn’t stop when you open to the menu, and we’ve made room for the controls to remain visible with it open as well.

The menu also provides a new tab-based layout that gives us room to add new features, including fan/follow, description, and a dedication, as well as space to add the upcoming audio control options.

We know of at least one bug with the new menu that we haven’t been able to effectively replicate and destroy. There might be a few others as well. Most should be squashed over the next week or two as we finish up this round of widget updates.

[Update] – oh yeah, we changed the first-play button. I don’t think it’s the final design, but we didn’t want to hold everything up just for this…

K, a quick post this time. Rolled out some new changes to make things much easier. Good news is that they’re totally obvious so we don’t need to offer a lot of explanations:

New mixtape play controls. They’re not perfect, but good enough for you guys.

New widget menu under the widget with:

Improved favorites selection

Show/hide sharing control panel (because we were tired of seeing it too)

Mixtape playlist

Yes, you can now see the mixtape’s playlist before you hit play.
Yes, it’s currently only on the website.
Yes, we will have playlists in the mixtape widget soon.
Yes, you can look up (and buy?) tracks via Amazon mp3.

We really want to give a huge shout-out and thank you to the WordPress team for busting their patooties and getting this out. Even Mixwit uses WordPress, so now we can finally post mixtapes ourselves! Enjoy!

4) Public alpha: No more alpha-user login box (i.e. no more “hamburger1”). The private testing is complete, but the project is still alpha quality (until a few more core features can be completed).

The Minors:

1) Image control: Your image is masked by the mixtape body, or can fill the whole tape. You can also scale the image and click & drag the image to make it look it’s best.

2) Text editing: You have options for editing and moving the text labels around, including click-and drag positioning. You can also double click on the text to enter your title and alias.

(quick note: the text editing & image dragging features will seem a bit quirky. We plan to expand these features pretty quickly, so the quirkiness will be resolved then.)

3) Glossiness: has been greatly increased to give users more bling contrast. This was rolled out last week, but we want to mention it for the early users, because old mixtapes are going to look extra-shiny.

4) New gears and spooled tape: We’ve replaced the schlocky gears with real-ish gears. Woot. The cool part is actually the spooled mag tape: It acts like real… uh… spooled tape. You’ll see.

5) Add your own track: Now you can add any track that you can find on the web.

6) Bug fixes: We still can’t claim to be bug free, but we squashed quite a few the past week. Most notably we worked out most of the kinks with Internet Explorer. Big thanks to everyone who reported bugs and an especially big thanks to Jake for lending us the windows box. Keep the reports coming!

There’s a ton of extra tweaks beyond these (like the addition of this blog), but why say more? Go play!